Utopianstudies 24 1 0105

Kazanistan: John Rawls's Oriental Utopia
Author(s): Antoine Hatzenberger

Source: Utopian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2013), pp. 105-118
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Kazanistan: John Rawls’s Oriental Utopia
Antoine Hatzenberger
abstract
In The Law of Peoples (1999), John Rawls develops the concept of realistic utopia
within the framework of a philosophy of international relations. In order to illustrate
his definition of “decent peoples” he imagines an “idealized Islamic people named
Kazanistan.” What are the context and status of the imaginary construct of a soci-
ety of peoples? How are the people of Kazanistan described? In what sense, and to
what extent, is this “idealized Islamic people” imagined by Rawls really a utopia?
Imagine an idealized Islamic people named “Kazanistan.”

Is realistic utopia a fantasy?
—John Rawls, The Law of Peoples
Using an intellectual device reminiscent of Montesquieu’s evocation of

oriental despotism in his Persian Letters as a pretext allowing him to criticize
eighteenth-century European monarchies, a columnist has recently reflected
on the “fantasy nation” that certain Americans dream of. What would
exemplify a Neoconservative vision of society as put forward in debates about
Utopian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2013

Copyright © 2013. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 105 29/03/13 12:56 AM

Utopian Studies 24.1
questions of social justice in the United States? asked Nicholas D. Kristof in

the New York Times ( June 4, 2011). He presented this question as an enigma
and offered a few clues meant to help in guessing what type of society would
conform to Neocon ideals. The society that would correspond to such a
model would be a society with a very low level of taxation, a society that
devotes a very large proportion of its budget to the army, a society embracing
traditional religious values and conservative sympathies. In which country
are only 2 percent of the population subject to taxation? In which country do
military generals alone decide the state’s foreign policy? And in which coun-
try are there prayers at school? “So what is this Republican Eden, this Utopia?”
asked the author of the article. This country is Pakistan. The answer is para-
doxical, as the description seemed to point toward the “low-tax laissez-faire
Eden” of the American Neocons, when it in fact corresponds to the situation
of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the point of this comparison being that
Washington could resemble an “Islamabad-on-the-Potomac.”
The scenario of Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Borat: Cultural Learnings of
America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006) is based on
the same chiastic scheme of estrangement. A burlesque avatar both of
Montesquieu’s Persian character and of Tocqueville in America, the hero
of this movie travels across the United States from east to west made up as
an ingenuous Oriental. Being from far-off Kazakhstan allows him all sorts
of naïvetés, as his pretended country of origin is considered by his hosts as
a country beyond the limits of their experience of the world, an unknown
place, a place from nowhere—a utopia. Kazakhstan is presented to them as a
scandalous stereotype of absolute otherness: it is meant to be a place of great
poverty, both economic and cultural, where morals and habits lean toward
extremities such as incest and anti-Semitism. As outrageously caricatural as
such an image might be, it nevertheless is surprisingly easily taken for granted
by some of the most righteous and right-minded people met by Borat in the
States and at the same time makes Kazakhstan a dystopia.
On the one hand, we have Pakistan, the “land of the pure”; on the other
hand, Kazakhtan, the “land of the Kazakhs.” In both cases, the Old Persian
suffix -stan means the “place” or the “land” (i.e., the topos of utopia or dysto-
pia), as, for instance, in Golestan (“Land of roses”), Rigestan (“Land of sand,”
or desert), Frangestan (Europe, “Land of the Francs”), or Zenjistan (“Land
of the blacks,” the Zendj).1 It just so happened that American philosopher
John Rawls, author of A Theory of Justice (1971), also created the name of a
106

antoine hatzenberger: Kazanistan
land following the same lexical pattern. This imaginary land, invented in The
Law of Peoples (1999), was called by Rawls “Kazanistan.”
In Rawls’s vocabulary, Kazanistan is the name for “an imagined example
of a non-liberal Muslim people” or “an example of an imaginary decent hier-
archical Muslim people.”2 This “idealized Islamic people named ‘Kazanistan’”
(75), whose name might have been inspired by the capital of Tatarstan, the
town of Kazan (a place where is to be found the biggest mosque of the
Russian Federation), form what could be considered John Rawls’s Oriental
utopia.
If certain thought experiments of A Theory of Justice could already be
loosely interpreted as utopian, it is really in the area of the philosophy of
international relations that Rawls specifically deals with the concept of “uto-
pia” as such. Indeed, in The Law of Peoples he explicitly elaborates on the main
idea of “realistic utopia” as well as, within this theoretical frame, the Oriental
utopia of the imaginary people of Kazanistan.
Although Rawls’s philosophy of international relations has been scru-
tinized by scholars, very few commentators have considered his conception
of realistic utopia in and of itself as a contemporary contribution to uto-
pian thinking in political philosophy. Its scope and consistency still need to
be evaluated. Above all, the fact that the only concrete example described by
Rawls is an Islamic country has not yet received full consideration. The time
has come to address this issue, which now has new significance in the wake
of a redefinition of the way Islamic countries are ruled and perceived. In this
historical context, a reflection on political utopian models is topical.
The aim of this new reading is threefold. First, I will explore the context
and status of the imaginary construct of a society of peoples (the Rawlsian
version of an international utopia), before then describing the utopia of
Kazanistan and finally asking in what sense, and to what extent, “the idealized
Islamic people” of Kazanistan imagined by Rawls really make up a utopia.
The Realistic Utopia of a Society of Peoples
The description of Kazanistan in John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples is part of

a development on the notion of “realistic utopia,” within the framework of
a theory of justice said to be “universal in reach.” The logic of this reason-
ing must first be highlighted. Rawls’s idea of a Society of Peoples belongs
107

to a movement of extending the theory of the social contract rooted in the

philosophies of the Enlightenment: he mentions Rousseau and Kant, but
Castel of Saint-Pierre’s peace projects for Europe also belong to this perspec-
tive. The great originality of Rawls’s specific approach in The Law of Peoples
lies in applying the concept of utopia to a contemporary reflection on inter-
national relations.
Rawls merely alluded to the question of international law in §58 of
A Theory of Justice while considering the possibility of extending the theory
of “justice as fairness” to the domain of international law. Nevertheless, the
basic premise was then a conception of justice strictly adapted to a society
structured as a closed system, isolated from other societies (§2). In this sense,
if A Theory of Justice had something, at least implicitly, utopian about it, it
was this insularism of its basic model3—to which could be added the idea of
the original position and the solution of the veil of ignorance, both utopian
tricks.
However, as Rawls himself admits in Political Liberalism (1993), to talk
about a closed society is an abstraction, which is only justified because its
purpose is to concentrate on certain questions without being distracted by
details. Even so, the question of international relations is far from being a
minor issue, and the 1993 lecture “The Law of Peoples,” where Rawls stated
that “the very special case of isolation of a society from all the rest” is “long
in the past now” and that now “every society must have a conception of how
it is related to other societies,”4 moved beyond this “abstraction” of a closed,
autarkic, and isolationist society. The ideals and principles of a domestic soci-
ety can thus become the models for and the first steps toward a further devel-
opment of the law of peoples.
In The Law of Peoples, Rawls’s “realistic utopia” first refers to “a sketch of
a reasonably just constitutional democratic society” on a domestic level. The
second meaning of “realistic utopia” then refers to the derived ideal model
of “a reasonably just Society of Peoples,” of which the different democracies
themselves would be members, following the ideals and principles of the law
of peoples (12, 11).
From a methodological point of view, “political philosophy is realisti-
cally utopian,” for Rawls, “when it extends what are ordinarily thought to be
the limits of practicable political possibility and, in so doing, reconciles us to
our political and social condition.” Because “the limits of the possible are not
given by the actual,” Rawls adds, “we have to rely on conjecture and specula-
tion” in political philosophy (11–12).
108

From the point of view of the content of the representation, Rawls calls
a realistic utopia “a world in which [the] great evils [i.e., unjust war, oppres-
sion, religious persecution, slavery, and the rest] have been eliminated and just
(or at least decent) basic institutions established by both liberal and decent
peoples who honour the Law of Peoples” (126)—that is to say, the utopia of
a reasonable Society of Peoples, ruled according to ideals stemming from the
theory of justice. This so-called realistic utopia of peace and justice is meant
to rule out both war and immigration.
The basic principles of the law of peoples are established by way of the
original position and the veil of ignorance: the representatives do not know
“the size of the territory, or the population, or the relative strength of the
people whose fundamental interests they represent” or “the extent of their
natural resources, or the level of their economic development” (32–33). In the
ideal theory, which aims at the stability of a liberal and democratic peace, the
principles of the law of peoples postulate the self-determination of free and
independent peoples, the equality of the parties, the respect of treaties, the
duty of nonintervention, the right to self-defense, the respect of the rights of
man and of the laws of war, and duties toward societies burdened by unfavor-
able conditions.
On the one hand, Rawls’s political conception of justice claims to be uto-
pian, as it uses “political (moral) ideals, principles, and concepts to specify a
reasonable and just society” and because of its inherent teleological perspec-
tive, which foresees that “as time goes on [peoples] tend to accept [the law
of peoples] as an ideal of conduct” (14, 44). On the other hand, this utopian
political conception is said to be realistic, as the law of peoples “proceeds from
the international political world as we see it” (83). Rawls takes up Rousseau’s
expression to consider the laws—here, the laws of peoples—“as they might
be” (the utopian dimension) and the men—or the peoples—“as they are” (the
realistic dimension [7]). Realism includes the solution according to which the
extension of the general idea of the social contract, first applied to demo-
cratic peoples, could also include peoples who are not democratically gov-
erned, following the principle of “reasonable pluralism” (11).
It is precisely this pragmatic conception of the law of peoples that leads
Rawls to resort to the example of Kazanistan, insofar as he extends the model
of a liberal society first to the idea of a society of democratic peoples and
then, up to a certain point, to some nonliberal societies. Rawls wants his con-
ception of the law of peoples to be “universal in reach,” and a realistic utopia
therefore comprises the idea of a horizon where the foreign policy of liberal
109

societies would “gradually” incite “to shape all not yet liberal societies in a
liberal direction, until eventually (in the ideal case) all societies are liberal”
(86, 60). In the meantime though, and in order to make such an evolution
easier, a provisional moral code must include a principle of toleration that
would allow some nonliberal societies to be recognized as members of the
society of peoples.
Rawls’s typology of peoples counts five categories. The “well-ordered
peoples” are, first, the “reasonable liberal people” (i.e., the democratic peo-
ples) and, second, the “decent hierarchical peoples.” There are also the “out-
law states”; the “societies burdened by unfavourable conditions”; and, finally,
the “benevolent absolutisms” (4). Almost nothing is said about the fifth type
in The Law of Peoples; the case of burdened societies is analyzed within the
framework of nonideal theory, in relation to questions of distributive justice
among peoples (duty of assistance and possibilities of international aid); the
existence of outlaw states poses the question of the law of war. For Rawls,
decent peoples, as well as reasonable liberal peoples, have the right to go to
war to defend themselves, and therefore “the rulers of the imagined decent
people, Kazanistan, could rightly defend their hierarchical Muslim society”
(92). It is therefore within the framework of an ideal theory, and as an exam-
ple of the second type of what Rawls categorizes as well-ordered societies,
that of decent hierarchical peoples, that the Oriental utopia of Kazanistan is
described.
Kazanistan
The defining characteristic of “decent hierarchical peoples”—the type exem-

plified by Kazanistan—is their attachment to external peace (which they try
to maintain through business and diplomacy), to human rights, and to a gen-
eral idea of justice that aims to achieve a certain form of common good.
Besides these general conditions allowing them to be members of the society
of peoples, “in decent hierarchical societies a state religion may, on some
questions, be the ultimate authority within society and may control govern-
ment policy on certain important matters” (74).
These characteristics had already been set out in “The Law of Peoples.”
Yet, in his commentary on John Rawls’s 1993 lecture, Stanley Hoffmann
remarks: “Like ‘well-ordered liberal societies,’ [decent hierarchical societies]
are an ideal type. Unlike the former, however, they have, as Rawls describes
110

them, no (or barely any) empirical, non-ideal counterparts in the real world;
one might perhaps think of Jordan, or Singapore, or Tunisia, but Rawls’s cat-
egory is an idealization (in the sense of beautification) of a very tiny group
of real states.”5 In the French translation of this review, Hoffmann adds that
“once again, it seems that what is mere ‘abstraction’ within a reflection upon
domestic government turns into a utopia in the philosophy of international
relations.”6
Hoffmann thus underlines the abstract utopianism of the first formula-
tion of Rawls’s law of peoples. Yet, what is original in The Law of Peoples, and
what distinguishes the two texts, is that Rawls goes a step further toward
a tentative exemplification, or schematism, insofar as he tries to match an
object with an ideal type. It is perhaps there that the realism of the realistic
utopia lies: in matching an object with a concept.
In The Law of Peoples, Rawls seems to come to terms with the utopia-
nism of his approach while at the same time specifying the abstract model
of the decent hierarchical people, not by referring to Jordan, Singapore, or
Tunisia—the real-world examples suggested by Hoffmann—but by building
from scratch the imaginary example of Kazanistan. If this move toward a
concrete-abstract representation of ideal theory is an innovation compared
with A Theory of Justice, and even with “The Law of Peoples” (1993), it also
represents an original procedure within the argumentation of The Law of
Peoples itself, as only the type of the decent hierarchical people is illustrated
with an example—albeit fictional. The only example is precisely Kazanistan,
which so appears as a model giving some consistency to the ideal theory and
the realistic utopia.
Rawls states both Kazanistan’s form of political regime and its cultural
identity. First, Kazanistan is qualified as a decent people, inasmuch as it “hon-
ours and respects human rights, and its basic structure contains a decent con-
sultation hierarchy, thereby giving a substantial political role to its members
in making political decisions” (64). Kazanistan is then presented as an Islamic
people and as a society in which state and religion are not distinct. The
description of Kazanistan focuses on these two characteristics, the political
aspect, which corresponds to a traditional dimension, and the cultural, which
corresponds to a potentially liberal dimension, emerging in the external prin-
ciple of pacifism and the internal principle of tolerance.
On the one hand, Rawls asserts that “unlike most Muslim rulers, the rul-
ers of Kazanistan have not sought empire and territory,” and taking inspi-
ration from Bernard Lewis’s research, he adds that “this is in part a result
111

of its theologians’ interpreting jihad in a spiritual and moral sense, and not
in military terms” (76).7 On the other hand, Rawls emphasizes that “among
[Kazanistan’s] special priorities is to establish a decent and rational Muslim
people respecting the religious minorities within it” and that “this decent
people is marked by its enlightened treatment of the various non-Islamic
religions and other minorities who have been living in its territory for gen-
erations, originating from conquests long ago or from immigration which
the people permitted” (77, 76). Besides, Rawls gives another guarantee of the
potential modernism of this traditional society in adding that the hierarchical
government takes seriously the objections brought to the fore during con-
sultative assemblies and that, for instance, “in Kazanistan dissent has led to
important reforms in the rights and role of women” (78).
Still, it remains that the two most notable characteristics of the descrip-
tion of Kazanistan put to the fore by Rawls in order to orientate his interpreta-
tion are the name of the country and the nature of its religion. Central Asian
or Middle Eastern toponym and Islam—these two salient signs of verisimili-
tude are combined to bring about the Islamic people of Kazanistan as creat-
ing an Oriental utopia. Despite the abstraction theoretically inherent to the
type of the decent hierarchical society, the model is rooted in the East. Rawls
orientates this Islamic people by giving some indications about their geneal-
ogy, as, for instance, in a footnote that includes Kazanistan in the Ottoman
tradition: “The doctrine [relative to toleration] I have attributed to the rulers
of Kazanistan was similar to one found in Islam some centuries ago. (The
Ottoman Empire tolerated Jews and Christians; the Ottoman rulers even
invited them to come to the capital city of Constantinople.) This doctrine
affirms the worthiness of all decent religions and provides the essentials of
what realistic utopia requires” (76). With Kazanistan, Rawls thus gives the
ideal type of the decent hierarchical people some historical depth and real-
istic substance. And, as already mentioned, it is the only model in the whole
of Rawls’s typology of societies to receive such a degree of specification and
concretization.
Nevertheless, a paradox appears: while Rawls gives this model of decent
hierarchical society some indications of Orientality (both onomastical and
religious), he thus symmetrically reinforces the implicit western characteriza-
tion of the archetype of the liberal people, from which the whole system of
realistic utopia derives. There are, however, several occurrences in The Law of
Peoples—and also earlier in “The Law of Peoples”—when Rawls tries to deny
the reading according to which the reasonable liberal society of A Theory
112

of Justice would only be another name for a western democracy. It is precisely

this interpretation that Rawls attempts to guard against in order to keep at
bay any suspicion of ethnocentrism: he strongly rejects the idea of setting a
western tradition of human rights against nonliberal societies and maintains
that “liberal and hierarchical societies can agree on the same law of peoples,
and so this law does not depend on aspects peculiar to the Western tradition.”8
Hence this difficulty: as Kazanistan is described as a singular utopia
within a global utopia, does “realistic utopia” refer to the idea of a society of
peoples or instead to any decent society that would make a universalization
of the law of peoples possible, thus contradicting any accusation of ethno-
centrism? In short, is the eastern utopia of Kazanistan really a utopia?
Utopia a minima?
By keeping only to the two external characteristics of Kazanistan (its name

and the religion of its people), one might consider Rawls’s utopianism to be
an orientalism, in the sense that Edward Said gives to the term when he says
that “the Orient is less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries
of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment
of a text, or a citation from someone’s work on the Orient, or some bit of
previous imagining, or an amalgam of all these.”9 Stereotyped description,
reference to the Ottoman Empire, a quote from Bernard Lewis—Said’s criti-
cism might well be relevant. However, when taking into account the other
definitional traits of Rawls’s Oriental—or maybe orientalist—utopia, another
series of remarks has to be made. In a sense, because Rawls describes in his
realistic utopia an Islamic society as a decent hierarchical people, but decent
only and not liberal, one might have the impression that he is implying that
an Islamic democracy would be an unrealistic utopia.
In this very sense, Kazanistan would thus be what Afghanistan has not
been so far: an Oriental utopia of democratization. Such a hypothesis would
send us back to more recent forms of utopias, such as the one imagined by
Peter Sloterdijk: the alternative utopia of instant democracy. For the exhi-
bition Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005), the German
philosopher designed a model of an inflatable Parliament, a kind of big din-
ghy that could be parachuted into any remote desert of the world and, once
unfolded in a semicircular shape, would set up a democratic system ready
for use.10
113

But in another sense, Rawls’s Kazanistan could seem a second-rate

topia, a utopia a minima. Indeed, the ideal type of a decent hierarchical soci-
u
ety presents some standard guarantees of modernism and liberalism, as it
allows tolerance of religious minorities, consideration given by the govern-
ment to the objections raised by the opposition, and the possibility of reflec-
tion upon the place of women in society.
First, however, even though other religions are tolerated in Kazanistan,
“Islam is the favored religion, and only Muslims can hold the upper positions
of political authority and influence the government’s main decisions and poli-
cies” (75). In this perspective, “in view of the possible inequality of religious
freedom” that might prevail, “it is essential that a hierarchical society allow
and provide assistance for the right of emigration” (74). But the right to emi-
grate given to religious minorities is not the same thing as liberty of con-
science. Second, a decent consultative hierarchy refers to what remains finally
a paternalistic regime, as the historical comparison made by Rawls indicates:
“The procedure of consultation is often mentioned in discussions of Islamic
political institutions; yet it is clear that the purpose of consultation is often
so that the Caliph can obtain a commitment of loyalty from his subjects, or
sometimes so that he can discern the strength of the opposition” (72).
In The Law of Peoples, the status of individual rights and of the person
is problematic in Kazanistan but also, as Rawls’s commentators have under-
lined, in decent hierarchical societies in general.11 Again, in order to avoid
making the law of peoples and human rights dependent on “Western indi-
vidualism,”12 Rawls defends the legitimacy of the model of “associationism”
for the decent hierarchical societies. Yet, intrinsically, the associationist social
form of hierarchical systems implies that individuals are not citizens, free and
equal, but members of peculiar groups or bodies within society.
What are the most striking features of Kazanistan? The definition of
citizenship is limitative, and liberty of conscience is not equal among all
members of society. These problematic points have given rise to numerous
criticisms,13 and Rawls himself appears at times to be rather dismissive of cer-
tain aspects of his own model. He is prompt to recognize, for instance, that
“the decent common good idea of hierarchical peoples is a minimal idea”;
that, for that matter, in decent hierarchical societies, there is no common
good as such but, rather, “special priorities”; and that decency (as in “decent
hierarchical peoples”) is a “weaker” idea than “reasonableness” (as in “rea-
sonable liberal peoples” [67]). Nevertheless, for Rawls, even if “doctrines that
114

deny full and equal liberty of conscience” are not reasonable, they “are not
fully unreasonable” (74).
Comparing John Rawls’s Oriental utopia to Thomas More’s archetypal
Utopia suffices to make Kazanistan appear a very moderate utopian form
indeed. Taking only the religious issue into question, in More’s Utopia (1516),
atheists, that is to say, those who do not believe in the immortality of souls,
and only they, were deprived of any honors and barred from becoming mag-
istrates; but otherwise, freedom of worship was perfectly admitted on the
island. Besides, considering that Rawls himself refers several times in The Law
of Peoples to eighteenth-century philosophers (especially to Montesquieu and
Rousseau), Kazanistan could also be compared with some radical utopias
from the classical age that put religious freedom at the heart of their system
in order to call both political absolutism and cultural uniformity into ques-
tion.14 So, at least comparatively, it would seem that Rawls’s realistic utopia is
in fact a minimalistic and self-limiting utopia.
What is Rawls’s own conclusion to the paragraph of The Law of Peoples

devoted to Kazanistan, the “example of an imaginary decent hierarchical
Muslim people” (64)? “I do not hold that Kazanistan is perfectly just, but it
does seem to me that such a society is decent. Moreover, even though it is
only imagined, I do not think it is unreasonable that a society like Kazanistan
might exist, especially as it is not without precedent in the real world. Readers
might charge me with baseless utopianism, but I disagree. Rather, it seems
to me that something like Kazanistan is the best we can realistically—and
coherently—hope for” (78). Such a concluding remark is another argument
in favor of an ideal theory of a law of peoples including nonliberal societies.
With this argument, Rawls also reasserts that the only alternative to this posi-
tion would be “a fatalistic cynicism.”
Yet, questions remain. Is Kazanistan really “the best we can hope for,”
as Rawls argues? Or in another view, quite to the contrary, would not such
a conclusion be “a counsel of despair,” as John Tasioulas puts it?15 More spe-
cifically, “is Islam condemned to become only this decent Kazanistan?” as
Hamadi Redissi wonders.16 Can Oriental utopias only be theologico-political?
Is the Ottoman model the only historical example of a “precedent in the real
world”? Would it not also be possible to revive other periods of the glori-
ous past of toleration in the history of Islam, such as, for instance, the myth
of convivencia in multicultural Andalusia?17 Besides, is there anything more
115

utopian than a caliphate (a system combining spiritual and political powers)?

Finally, is Kazanistan a utopia if it once existed or if it can still exist? Is it to
hope, or rather, to wish, according to More’s famous distinction?
As was suggested in the introduction, this reading of Rawls’s The Law
of Peoples has particular resonance in today’s context. Indeed, the peoples
of the Islamic world face new choices and must choose between different
models of identity and governance. Among them the theologico-political
is looming—thus the renewed relevance of the questions raised by Rawls’s
utopia.
What is now more apparent is that Rawls could have been more radical
in his fantasy and could have imagined a less conciliatory blueprint, avoiding
the overlap of religion and civil society. This is not an attempt to unmask
Rawls as a liberal, or as an orientalist, for that matter, but shows that he
could have been far more liberal on the religious issue—and an orientalist
in another sense. In other words, toleration should be a principle for all well-
ordered peoples, whether reasonable or decent, and his realistic utopia might
perhaps have been more utopian if he had based it on Al-Andalus rather than
his recollection of the Ottoman Empire. The “Andalusian dream” (the dream
of a harmonious multireligious society), as it was put to the fore by some
utopians, however mythical it might be in its detail, is nonetheless a means of
stressing the importance of real equality and freedom for different communi-
ties in a multireligious society. References to this model point toward the idea
of an Islamic society granting protection to its Jewish or Christian members.
The history of such a settlement was complex and short-lived, but the utopia
of Córdoba could still offer a counterfactual to Rawls’s reconstruction of a
unanimous society.
Another model of Oriental radical utopias was the “pirate utopia” of the
Maghreb, according to Peter Lamborn Wilson’s reconstruction. Within these
nonsectarian and cosmo-political communities, all individuals were granted
full status wherever they came from, whatever language they spoke, whatever
their origin or faith.18
In his comment on “The Law of Peoples,” Stanley Hoffmann feels that
“Rawls’s law of peoples has been shaped so as to appeal to a purely hypo-
thetical group of peoples”19—Jordan, Singapore, and Tunisia, he is suggest-
ing. Let me add that it might now be possible to speculate that the recent
history of Arab upheavals will perhaps disrupt the Rawlsian classification of
political models, open up new types of societies, and create other examples of
116

Oriental utopias, as well as more utopian definitions of realistic utopias. So,

can utopia be realistic or realized? It seems that history has begun to answer,
and the near future will tell.
Notes
1. Wikipedia dixit.
2. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 5, 64;
hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number.
3. On utopia as closed society, see Antoine Hatzenberger, “Islands and Empire:
Beyond the Shores of Utopia,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 8, no. 1
(2003): 119–28.
4. John Rawls, “The Law of Peoples,” Critical Inquiry 20 (Autumn 1993): 36–68, at 38.
(This work also appears in Stephen Shute and Susan Hurley, eds., On Human Rights: The
Oxford Amnesty Lectures [New York: Basic Books, 1993].)
5. Stanley Hoffmann, “Dreams of a Just World,” New York Review of Books,
November 2, 1995, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/nov/02/
dreams-of-a-just-world/.
6. Stanley Hoffmann, “Mondes idéaux,” trans. Jérôme Giudicelli and Bertrand
Guillarme, in John Rawls, Le Droit des gens (Paris: Esprit, 10/18, 1996), 115–54, at 140.
7. Rawls refers to Bernard Lewis’s The Middle East (New York: Scribner, 1995).
8. Rawls, “Law of Peoples,” 41; see also 57: “Human rights . . . could not be rejected as
peculiarly liberal or special to our Western tradition.”
9. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; London:
Penguin Books, 1995), 177.
10. Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy
(Karlsruhe: Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, 2005).
11. See, for instance, Stanley Hoffmann’s (“Dreams of a Just World”) and Bertrand
Guillarme’s (“Y a-t-il des principes de justice pertinents hors des frontières des régimes
démocratiques?” in John Rawls, Le Droit des gens [Paris: Esprit, 1996], 9–42) comments
about “The Law of Peoples.” The problem of the individual leads to criticism of the
Rawlsian solution, particularly in the case of stateless peoples and migrants. The
conception of international laws is at stake, whether the political subject of right is the
person or a people. See Kok-Chor Tan, “The Problem of Decent Peoples,” in Rawls’s
Law of Peoples: A Realistic Utopia, ed. Rex Martin and David A. Reidy (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006), 76–94.
12. Rawls, “Law of Peoples,” 57.
13. Stanley Hoffmann speaks of “Rawls’s meager law of peoples” (“Dreams of a Just
World”), and John Tasioulas, of “the unacceptable minimalism of Rawls’s human rights
doctrine” (“From Utopia to Kazanistan: John Rawls and the Law of Peoples,” Oxford
Journal of Legal Studies 22, no. 2 [2002]: 367–96, at 382).
117

14. See Antoine Hatzenberger, “‘Passer les monts’: Rousseau et l’apostasie,” in La

Théologie politique de Rousseau, ed. Ghislain Waterlot (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de
Rennes, 2010), 109–33.
15. Tasioulas, “From Utopia to Kazanistan,” 396.
16. Hamadi Redissi asks this question in the conclusion of his history of
Wahhabism; see his Le Pacte de Nadjd, ou comment l’islam sectaire est devenu l’islam
(Paris: Seuil, 2007), 327.
17. See Michel Warschawski, Israël-Palestine, le défi binational (Paris: Textuel,
2001), 123–30.
18. See Peter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes
(Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1995).
19. Hoffmann, “Dreams of a Just World.”
118

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Kazanistan: John Rawls's Oriental Utopia

Author(s): Antoine Hatzenberger

Imagine an idealized Islamic people named “Kazanistan.”

Using an intellectual device reminiscent of Montesquieu’s evocation of

Utopian Studies, Vol. 24, No. 1, 2013

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 105 29/03/13 12:56 AM

questions of social justice in the United States? asked Nicholas D. Kristof in

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 106 29/03/13 12:56 AM

The Realistic Utopia of a Society of Peoples

The description of Kazanistan in John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples is part of

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 107 29/03/13 12:56 AM

to a movement of extending the theory of the social contract rooted in the

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 108 29/03/13 12:56 AM

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 109 29/03/13 12:56 AM

The defining characteristic of “decent hierarchical peoples”—the type exem-

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 110 29/03/13 12:56 AM

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 111 29/03/13 12:56 AM

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 112 29/03/13 12:56 AM

of Justice would only be another name for a western democracy. It is precisely

By keeping only to the two external characteristics of Kazanistan (its name

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 113 29/03/13 12:56 AM

But in another sense, Rawls’s Kazanistan could seem a second-rate

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 114 29/03/13 12:56 AM

What is Rawls’s own conclusion to the paragraph of The Law of Peoples

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 115 29/03/13 12:56 AM

utopian than a caliphate (a system combining spiritual and political powers)?

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 116 29/03/13 12:56 AM

Oriental utopias, as well as more utopian definitions of realistic utopias. So,

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 117 29/03/13 12:56 AM

14. See Antoine Hatzenberger, “‘Passer les monts’: Rousseau et l’apostasie,” in La

UTS 24.1_08_Hatzenberger.indd 118 29/03/13 12:56 AM

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